


Life of Glam!

by Charliechaz



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician), Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Closeted Character, DADT Repeal, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 22:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1049468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charliechaz/pseuds/Charliechaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad comes back from his two year exchange to discover his very secret boyfriend has come in second place on American Idol.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life of Glam!

**Author's Note:**

> Special Thanks to Buhnebeest, who was my Beta waaaay back this summer.  
> But seriously folks, comments and crits welcome. If it completely sucks please tell me so I can remove it from the interwebs…

Brad comes back from his two-year exchange to discover that his very secret boyfriend has come in second place on American Idol. The word shock would be an understatement. But there's also the bit about coming out on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. _Rolling Stone. Really._

Somehow Adam almost winning ‘American Idol’ leads to Brad Colbert being the poster child for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Something that is made all the more aggravating for all the times a democratic pundit on MSNBC congratulates him on air.

Here’s how it happens:

*

He and Adam used coded letters while Brad was gone. Phone calls and video chats weren’t an option, not when using military communications networks. This made it easy for Adam to be deliberately vague when describing what was going on in his life…hanging out, meeting new friends, singing a lot…all lies. Brad is not even out to his family so it's not like his mother noticed his boyfriend on TV and the little time he does talk to his family isn’t devoted to television he can’t watch and programs he wouldn’t watch even if had television access anyway. It also helps that Brad has the image of being is so anti-social, anti-relationship, being pro-prostitute (according to the rumors at least) and pro-one-night-stand so no one in England ever mentions freaking American talent shows, nor does anyone ever question why Brad never mentions a girl he misses back home when all the other guys are reminiscing about home and how much they miss pussy.

But Brad does have someone he misses and that someone is a bit girly…flamboyant at least. So Brad can smile to himself and get it when the other guys talk about the mysteries of their wives and girlfriends. How they used to hate the smell of nail polish remover and the whirl of the hair dryer in the morning or the color eye powder that would stain the edge of the bathroom sink. Now – miles away from home wrapped in camouflage and Kevlar – they would relish the opportunity to see their girl fresh out the shower with a towel holding up her hair out walking around the house on the back of her heels with cotton balls between her toes, asking about the color or the strange look of concentration as she does her eyeliner _just so_ before a night out causing them to be late to meet up with the group.

It is because of this that Brad forgives (falls into bed with) Adam right away when he gets home, despite the fact that Adam secretly went and got famous while Brad didn’t have internet access. Adam is gifted with the press and remains open about his sexuality, but secretive when discussing his dating (sex) life. Adam is quick to respond that even gay celebrities deserve a personal life. This makes Brad happy because he definitely doesn’t want, nor can he, come out.

The _American Idol_ tour did make it difficult at first, but it gave Brad time to catch up with his family and come out to Ray who laughed…a lot. Brad Colbert, reconnaissance marine, stone cold Hebrew warrior in a closeted, albeit committed, relationship with a Top 40, make-up wearing, bedazzled-pant-strutting, red-carpet-posing, guy-lining glam rock boyfriend whose previous occupation was understudy in a traveling musical theatre and circus act.

But then the tour is over and Adam is ready to work on his first studio album. Brad is tethered to Oceanside and Adam is out of town all the time to meet with producers. They never have time for each other so…Adam moves in.

They’re not stupid. Adam keeps his tiny apartment in West Hollywood so even if a creep at the DMV sells his information or his contract documents are leaked, no one can get Brad’s address. The commute is long, but it is worth it. Plus the paparazzi are unlikely to sit in the traffic all the way down to Oceanside. Most assume that Adam is stereotypically a gay-mama’s boy visiting his mother frequently in San Diego, and no magazine is going to pay for pictures of that.

After Chanukah its gets weird …or weirder. Brad gets promoted to Gunnery Sergeant which entails travel and a lot of public speaking about combat stress. Adam gets booked for back-to-back performances at the Grammy’s and Good Morning America. Brad, along with the rest of America, watches as Adam tongues his bassist, Tommy Ratcliff, on live television. Adam is on the redeye to New York for the Good Morning America taping when the Internet explodes because two men kissed on tv. _Good Morning America_ cancels his appearance in reaction to homophobia and family value complaints from viewers.

_But honestly how many emails **can** they have gotten in 10 hours!_

Ray helpfully sends Brad a gif of Adam kissing Tommy. Opening that email at work is an awkward moment until he tells the guys it’s from Ray. The guys who have been in the platoon a while shrug it off and explain Ray’s quirkiness about dudes, gays, bars, Las Vegas, pop music and the pussy politics of the world to the new guys.

Since Adam is in New York, his ‘people’ have him sit down with VH-1 within hours of the cancellation. Adam goes on and on about freedom of expression and media hypocrisy comparing himself and his bassist to the Britney Spears, Madonna, Christina Aguilera three-way make-out at the VMA’s a few years back. GLAAD weighs in with an official twitter response and an overzealous Christian church in San Diego starts posting anti-gay signs in the Lamberts' neighborhood.

Later in the press tour when Adam is pressed to response if he’s disappointed or angry about the _Good Morning America_ cancellation and if he regrets the ‘kiss’ Adam says, “My family, my friends and my fans support me for who I am. I’m not worried about my career.” Then he adds, in that flippant way of his, “My boyfriend eh, he might have something to say when I get home.”

That statement has Perez Hilton and TMZ (something which Brad had never heard of before and still doesn’t quite understand) speculating about Adam’s mystery lover. Leading suspects include every out celebrity; the two frontrunners are Lance Bass (seriously folks?) and Tommy himself. Brad wonders what brilliant journalistic mind figured out the boyfriend might be the dude that Adam kissed (forget that Tommy has girlfriend way out of his league).

For Brad’s part, he’s not upset about the kiss; he is upset that Adam being gay, something which was not a secret, was suddenly breaking news. It only confirms Brad's hatred of mainstream journalism, chief of all CNN. Although Brad does decide that at 31 years old is about the right time to finally tell his parents he’s not waiting for the right girl and that his last fiancé was right to leave even if she went about it the wrong way. Telling his family is surprisingly easy. _Freaking Californians._ They already knew, they were just waiting for Brad to be comfortable and were hoping he’d leave the military before getting a boyfriend. It is also a moment where he realizes how perceptive parents can be. All the times he thought he got away with something his parents had to have known. All the times in high school he came home drunk and pretended to be sober by rinsing his mouth out with binaca….when he lost his virginity…when he’d gotten high the first time…all the porn history he deleted from the family computer in the days of dial-up internet.

What transforms February into super weirdness is that the whole mess with Adam doing the completely obvious thing of kissing a man and admitting to having a boyfriend causes a bidding war for _Adam Lambert: Life of Glam the reality show._

At first Brad isn’t worried. He and Adam are very different people, but they both despise the _Keeping Up with the Kardashsians_ and all things _E! Network._ (Brad never mentions his secret passion for _the Girls Next Door._ He thinks it’s all the knee socks which he finds so fascinating.) But then Adam broaches the topic of _Life of Glam_ so sweetly. He’s in snowflake pajama pants and one of Brad’s old PT shirts, only the C L T are visible. He face is free of make up so Brad can see his freckles, his hair is product free and fluffy. He would give in Adam anything in that moment; but he cannot just go around representing the military on reality show. Its conduct unbecoming….right?

Then of course Adam gets drunk in a nightclub in Seattle. Seattle! His phone is stolen and by the time Brad finds out and rushes to the nearest Apple store like a co-ed on load disbursement day and re-syncs the new phone it seems every bottom feeding news outlet has already hacked into the phone (Adam’s password: high and tight) Which was really funny at the time he chose it, but is now just embarrassing. Which means the mysterious boyfriend has a name, Brad Colbert, in a matter of hours the world seems to know who he is and that the hot guy from True Blood played him in a movie. This, of course, means he is ridiculously easy for people to google. _Fucking HBO!_ He knew that embedding journalists with troops was a bad idea. Rolling stone re-posts the articles at the top of its RSS feed, Anderson Cooper does a very somber ridiculist saluting Adam for getting wasted and busting open the doors on gay equality just like Paris Hilton did when her phone revealed texts of messages the philandering Mayor of San Francisco. Anderson mockingly applauds mediocre celebrities getting wasted and dropping shit in public as an essential catalyst for social change. _The Daily Show_ does a segment and Colbert puts him “On Notice!” in between clips of Alexander Skarsgard playing him and that vampire alleging that America is in danger from sexy gay men, who will turn into vampires who will twinkle in the sunlight and suck the marrow out of America’s God-given homophobic bones. Stephen Colbert then asks Brad, for the sake of his country, to not be so beautiful and solemnly removes Ryan Gosling from the threat down list. The result is madness, causing the security people at LAX to advise Adam to fly into Palm Springs and drive back to Oceanside.

The drive is excruciatingly cliché, picking up your hung-over rock star boyfriend in PALMS SPRINGS in a six cylinder rental for a four-hour covert car ride is not even the cringe worthy moment of that week. That would be the summons to meet the base commander at 0800 the next day that as them both worried.

The meeting is subdued. Nobody in the room looks happy, but it seems calls from the armed forces senate committee, the USO and Secretary of Defense have come to the consensus that this is a great opportunity to change the dialogue, help the news cycle transition by getting people off sexual assault issues and showing that the military can adapt to social change. It’s all very _wag the dog_. He gets a moto video conference call from someone at the White House and suddenly Obama is on the phone talking about the ‘war at home’ and true courage being the courage to be himself. Clearly the language was carefully chosen from Obama’s constitutional law professor soul to persuade him (if not a little augmented by the communication directors) and repeated enough in the hopes that Brad would subconsciously use the same phrasing when he is inevitably interviewed by the press.

He can’t say no. It is practically a damn order to allow himself on the show.

Throughout the exchange the base commander looks like he’d rather napalm himself and have is ashy remains scattered over the Occupy Wall Street tent city than know anything more about Brad’s ‘home life’. As punishment for Ray’s gleeful Schadenfreude when Brad relays the story of the meeting to Ray Brad tells ‘everyone’ that Josh Ray Person is his agent and gives the number and address to Ray’s document solutions company in Orange County. Surprisingly Ray takes the job with great aplomb, and for free. _Don’t be shocked. I was on the debate team in high school and I run a document solutions company._

The _E! Network_ sends over a very lovely fruit basket after Brad signs his contract. It’s a couple thousand per episode, with points on the back end for DVD sales and download-ables. The network has the first option to renew after the first season of sixteen episodes. Ray even forwards on a handwritten letter from California Senator Dianne Feinstein who waxes on about the assassinated Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk; Dustin Lance Black writes a letter of support, co-signed by Sean Penn and Carl Reiner, that is really a movie deal in disguise which Ray promptly (and politely) declines. Evan Wright sends a one-word email that reads: Scooped. Ray steadfastly denies the existence of any hate-mail, but does confirm that Bradam already has two unofficial fan clubs . “Twitter people move fast”, he says by way of explanation. So obviously Ray then had to form an official fan club, as an LLC of course.

A team of people descends on his beachside bungalow installing cameras ( _you won’t even see them_ ) the size of his fist all around his house; in his cars and even the bathrooms. Then 19 months after Adam came second place on American Idol there is man in his kitchen at six am with a boom mic telling him to ‘act natural’.

A few months after that the hazing begins, and promotional _Life of Glam_ posters start appearing in his locker and someone helpfully replaces all of his uniform shirts with cut off tie-dye replicas. The gyms on base seem tuned to Adam Lambert songs whenever he drops in. It’s all in good fun, but Brad never finds anything all that funny let alone the biggest aspect of his personal life. The secret he was asked to keep and endure for the sake of his country and his career. He had already accepted that he could not have the two things he want most in the world at the same time, and that he might never ever have had the chance at the second if he had died in pursuit of the first. It was terribly unfair, but it wasn’t like Brad hadn’t known this truth when he enlisted. Never once complained…and then all the rules went and changed. The veritable rug was pulled from under him and despite the sheer lunacy of everything, it seemed almost unconscionable that his country could ask something more of him, and parade him around.

When the show premieres it’s a big hit.

He watches at home, with Adam. It seemed ridiculous at first, but he finally gets that whole courage at home bull crap. Something as simple at being honest was both a political statement and a kind of actualization in a way nothing else had ever been. Not repelling from a helicopter, freezing on a mountain side, not surviving a firefight or the tragedy of shooting a car barreling through a check point only to find civilians inside or the helplessness of bandaging a young girl’s ankle because you knew there was nothing you could do that would actually help or make her life better. Being himself was the hardest thing he had ever done because it was the one thing he was terrible at; the one thing he was never asked to be, but along with rest of America he learns that the life of glam isn’t glamorous, it isn’t sheer absurdity like the rest of the E! network, its isn’t the political propaganda of Washington and cable news, its isn’t a gilded cage, it isn’t star crossed lovers or sex or glitter. It’s a life, like everyone else’s. Simple. Ordinary. Unremarkable, but important to only those involved.

It's not what he never knew he always wanted; it was something he never allowed himself to want.

**Author's Note:**

> Umm…I am bad at these things. Basically I had a bizarre craving for Brad and Adam Lambert. I find the juxtaposition between the two both intriguing and kind of hot. After a while I figure I should role up my sleeves and give this whole fanfic thing a whirl. 
> 
> Let me know if you liked/disliked it.


End file.
